False Value (Rivers of London 8)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘Percy Pig?’ asked Guleed, holding up the pack.

  ‘I got them for Brent,’ I said.

  Fortunately, there was a packet of Marks & Spencer ginger nuts and two bottles of lukewarm Highland Spring.

  ‘They’re not thrilled,’ said Guleed suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Michael’s family in Hong Kong,’ said Guleed. ‘They’re not thrilled. About the melanin thing.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Not that anyone said anything,’ she said. ‘Nobody . . . objected. Certainly not in front of me. Not in English anyway but, you know, there was that ripple when I was introduced. That hesitation – you know?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That.’

  ‘Like they were all carefully reviewing their next words just in case something slipped out. Something unfortunate.’ She sighed. ‘And my problem is that I don’t know whether I want to put up with that – whether I can put up with that.’

  ‘Do you love him?’

  Guleed looked shocked.

  ‘Say that again.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘That. That word.’

  ‘What? Love?’

  Guleed laughed.

  ‘I’ve never heard you use that word before,’ she said. ‘At least not seriously. Who are you, and what have you done with the real Peter Grant?’

  ‘Stop avoiding the question,’ I said.

  ‘What was the question again?’

  ‘Do you love him?’

  This time Guleed covered her mouth to smother her laughter.

  ‘It’s not that funny,’ I said.

  ‘Not for you maybe,’ she said. ‘But for everybody else . . .’

  I waited with as much dignity as I could muster.

  ‘Yes, I love him,’ she said finally. ‘Does that make a difference?’

  ‘What do you think?’ I said, which is my shrink’s favourite comeback.

  ‘I didn’t ask him to convert, you know,’ she said. ‘He volunteered – I’d have married him in a registry office with no fuss.’

  ‘I bet your parents would have loved that.’

  ‘They love him more than they love me,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe his family will get used to you.’

  ‘You mean the same way they would chronic back pain,’ said Guleed.

  I was about to say that they might actually change, when a blue Hyundai pulled in beside us. Maginty had brought along his skipper – a short, round Asian sergeant by the name of Yasmin Mahmood.

  ‘I don’t trust him out on his own,’ she said, after we were introduced. ‘He’s been led into bad ways.’

  Given that Maginty still had sterile dressings on his forehead and right cheek, I didn’t think I could argue.

  As police, we are perfectly entitled to stick our noses in where we’re not wanted. However, because Terrence Skinner and God knows what in the way of destructive Falcon material might be in the warehouse, we didn’t want anyone inside to clock that we were sniffing around. The problem was that with the expanse of weed-strewn emptiness around the lorries it was going to be hard to get close without looking suspicious.

  ‘That might be why they’re parked where they are,’ said Guleed.

  But luckily, as police, we also knew that people in general wandered through life in a state of blissful obliviousness, and that if you were swift and didn’t act suspiciously you could cross thirty-odd metres of open ground without drawing attention.

  Nine times out of ten.

  As we strolled across, Guleed asked me whether me and Beverley were going to get married.

  ‘That’s a good question,’ I said. ‘We’ve talked about it, but there’s problems.’

  ‘Like what?’ Guleed sounded sceptical.

  ‘Ceremonies,’ I said, ‘can be dangerous things around people like Bev. We don’t want to get hitched and then find it’s necessary to spend every second Sunday outside the New Malden branch of Dreams scattering rose petals into the culvert to keep the relationship going.’

  ‘Is that sort of thing likely?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Neither does anyone else.’

  ‘Seems far-fetched,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you just say you don’t want to get married?’

  ‘Let’s just say we want to take it slowly,’ I said.

  ‘Slowly,’ said Guleed. ‘You’re having kids!’

  ‘All the more reason to wait until they’re old enough to express an opinion,’ I said, and Guleed snorted.

  ‘I’m going to hold you to that,’ she said as we fetched up at rear of the first artic.

  We’d brought a bolt cutter, but in any event the rear door was unlocked – although I had to perch on a narrow ledge along the back to get it open. The container was only half full and my penlight illuminated a wall of all too familiar greasy grey-green plastic. As I climbed inside I sensed an equally familiar vestigium – the same rotting fish smell like a plateau de fruits de mer that had been left in the sun for three days straight.

  What appeared to be a solid wall of plastic wasn’t, of course. I could trace the outline of a mechanical torso, the lines where one drone’s wings fitted between another’s legs. It was a three-dimensional puzzle constructed out of drones – they seemed dormant at first, but as I got closer I heard a noise. A high-pitched fluttering buzz like the wings of a fly vibrating against a window pane.

  I estimated that half the length of the container was packed with sleeping drones. A solid forty cubic metres of the fuckers. I backed slowly out of the container and climbed down onto the gravel.

  ‘And?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘We call everyone in,’ I said.

  It took them an hour to arrive, which gave us plenty of time to check the other two containers. The middle one was empty but the third was completely packed.

  ‘What are they for?’ asked Guleed, as we walked away even more briskly than we’d approached.

  ‘Nothing good,’ I said.

  While we waited for Nightingale to arrive, Guleed ferreted out the site manager and extracted everything she knew about the warehouse.

  ‘Which was not much,’ said Guleed. The building was leased by a company called ThisIsNotABanana, which we found out later was one of a series of shell companies designed to obscure the real owner, Terrence Skinner, and keep it at arm’s length from the Serious Cybernetics Corporation.

  ‘He did say that it had its own electrical substation,’ said Guleed. ‘Although why they’d need one I don’t know, unless they’re growing dope or something.’

  Guleed hadn’t spent the last month embedded in the upper tech industry like I had, so I explained.

  ‘A lot of computers,’ I said. ‘And their air conditioners.’

  ‘And for that they need a whole substation to themselves?’

  ‘A lot of computers.’

  ‘To do what?’

  Which was the same question Nightingale and Stephanopoulos asked when they rocked up with a couple of vans of TSG and the local duty inspector, who was there to make sure us Londoners didn’t do anything elitely metropolitan on his manor.

  I gave them most of the options, but left out Bitcoin mining. Because not only would the explanation of why that uses huge amount of power have taken about three hours, but also because I was a bit hazy on the details myself.

  I explained Plan A, which went down about as well as I expected.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Nightingale, but I could see Stephanopoulos had given it more thought.

  ‘Peter’s right – it is what it is,’ she said. ‘We have to try it his way in the first instance.’

  Nightingale gave me a narrow-eyed look.

  ‘If needs must,’ he said. ‘But I want you to be cautious.’

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Cautious is my middle name.�
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  ‘But your first name is Never Knowingly,’ said Stephanopoulos. Which got all the laughs it deserved.

  But first we wanted a quick look at the Transit van parked outside, so I took Guleed. Or rather, given that she was a skipper, she supervised my initial approach.

  ‘You’re thinking the Print Shop?’ she asked as we walked across the staff car park.

  ‘Why else would they use an antique?’ I said.

  Something with no microprocessor to sand, and thus safe to use around high-intensity magic. At some point, I thought, we’re going to have to start tracking thefts of old vans – I mean, why else would anyone steal one?

  This specimen was well kept, with a recent paint job and unworn tyres. We strolled up until the side of the van hid us from the main building and I peered in through the passenger side window. The interior trim was ragged, the seat covers torn and held together with duct tape. I craned my head to see over the seats into the back, but all I could make out was a rumpled lump.

  On really old model Fords you used to be able to open the doors with a house key, but unfortunately this particular one came from a more recent and less enlightened time. Still, on the off chance, I tried the sliding door in the side. And, to my surprise, it opened.

  Inside a tarpaulin was draped over a suspiciously cubed shape. While Guleed kept watch I lifted the tarp to reveal the faceted steel and brass corner of the Mary Engine. Judging from the scratching on the cast-iron frame this one had seen some use recently. I leaned in and pressed my fingertips against the cool metal – the surface was greasy with light oil, and beneath that I sensed the creaking mechanical rocking motion of a Newcombe Steam Engine.

  And, behind that, a horribly familiar sensation like wriggling cilia and the stench of rotting shrimp.

  This was definitely the original Mary Engine, the one Skinner had brought over from the States, and if it was stashed out here in the van, what the fuck was in the warehouse?

  I snatched my hand away and slid the van door closed.

  ‘Did you bring your knife?’ I asked Guleed.

  ‘They’re bound to have spotted us by now,’ she said as she handed me a bone-handled fisherman’s clasp knife that she swore she only used for getting the stones out of horses’ hooves.

  ‘Can’t be helped,’ I said, and carefully punctured first the front and then the rear left-hand tyres. The trick is to turn the blade so it slips between the radials rather than cuts through them.

  I handed Guleed back her knife and she examined the blade critically.

  ‘Whatever happens,’ I said, ‘we can’t lose this.’ I pointed at the Mary Engine.

  Guleed nodded and put away her knife.

  ‘Good luck,’ she said as I adjusted my suit jacket into respectability.

  ‘Right,’ I said, suddenly dry-mouthed. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

  The main entrance was a pair of innocuous double doors, made of metal and painted with white enamel. A sign attached to the right-hand side said that visitors should use the intercom. This was a silver speaker grille and button recessed into the metal wall beside the door. There was no company logo or helpful name, not even a unit number to aid deliveries. Serves them right if their pizza never arrives, I thought.

  I pressed the button and, while I waited, I checked and counted at least three CCTV cameras covering the door.

  The only reason Seawoll and Nightingale were letting me try Plan A was because Plan B involved a protracted siege, and Plan C involved us going full Nightingale. And for that we’d need authorisation from the Commissioner and possibly, since we were on Kent Police’s turf, the Home Office as well.

  There was a buzz, the door opened and I stepped through.

  Into a small antechamber with bare walls and ceiling of cemented concrete blocks; the air was close and unventilated and the only other break in the wall was another reinforced composite security door opposite the entrance. Written on the door in small unfriendly letters were the words: Don’t Panic!

  And underneath: This door will not open until outer door is closed.

  There was no visible keypad, retina scanner, lock or even a doorbell, although two Perspex domes in the ceiling marked the presence of more CCTV cameras. Like the secret lift back at the SCC, the security here relied on someone inside letting you in.

  The entrance closed behind me with the clatter of electromagnetic deadbolts.

  Someone or something? I wondered.

  Whichever it was, they made me wait at least a minute in the dead air of the antechamber before the inner door buzzed and opened inwards. Lights flickered on, revealing a long corridor lined with rigid metal fencing. The roar of the heavy-duty air conditioning gave away the room’s function – beyond the metal fences were rows of what looked like high-end music centres mounted on shelving units. These were what Everest and Victor would call HPC platforms – High Performance Computing. This was either a server farm or a data storage facility, the sort of thing City firms use to back up their data. At this level of computing, Victor had told me, you didn’t measure things in kilobytes or MIPS.

  ‘You have to assume they’re running the latest kit,’ he said. ‘So you measure everything in kilowatts of IT load.’

  Hundreds of kilowatts, thousands in a room like this.

  And there was room for another floor above my head.

  There were gates through the fences halfway along the corridor. Locked, but again with no key or touchpad. I paused to watch the unblinking blue lights arrayed across the faces of the black boxes. Victor or Everest probably could have made a guess as to their make and purpose, but all I saw was an enormous magical accident waiting to happen.

  Skinner had made his fortune designing servers, and for all we knew the whole of London’s internet depended on these machines. One magical ‘incident’ and it was goodbye Netflix, Pornhub and online shopping. And the economy would take the kind of hit that registers on the quarterly GDP figures.

  Which was why Plan A involved me walking in and having a chat with Skinner.

  The world is full of rooms like this, for data storage, server farms or internet backbones, although 70 per cent of internet traffic passes through Loudoun County in Virginia. Reynolds says she thinks that’s so spooks from the NSA don’t have a long commute when installing yet another tap.

  I’d said that I was fairly certain that you didn’t use a long cable to tap the internet and she shrugged, and we waited a couple of seconds in case whoever was monitoring us could break into the Skype call and put us straight.

  The wall at the far end was covered in foam cut into egg-crate shapes to act as sound baffling. The wide door set into the wall was similarly covered, making it hard to spot from a distance. There was yet another press-button intercom which gave me a static shock when I used it.

  The intercom hummed and crackled. Then there was a thunk from behind the door and it started to slowly retreat into the wall. I went to step through and stopped – the wall was at least half a metre thick. The door had to be dragged all the way out by hydraulic arms on the other side and then ponderously swung aside.

  ‘Stand clear of the moving doors,’ said the intercom, followed by something that would have sounded like, if a person not a machine had made it, a snigger. As I walked through I stopped to examine the wall. It was composed of layers of different materials of different thicknesses, like the composite armour you find on modern tanks – thin layers of metal, thick planks of yellow pine and a couple of thicker layers of what looked like insulating foam. If I’d sat down to design a wall for protecting electronics against serious magic abuse, I’d have come up with something like that.

  Good, I thought, I don’t need to be as careful as I thought I did.

  ‘Glad to be of service,’ said the door as it started closing behind me.

  The room I’d entered took up a quarter of the warehouse a
nd was open all the way up to its steel rafters. The walls were lined with the same foam soundproofing as the wall I’d just walked through. The floor was an expanse of thick wood planking polished to a high sheen, surrounding a dais on which sat a plinth topped by an array of modern stainless-steel musical pipes. It was an honest-to-God organ – or rather, I saw as I looked closer, a modern streamlined copy of an automatic fairground organ. One that had been stripped of its baroque gilt decoration which had been replaced by matt black metal grilles and smooth grey panels with aluminium trim. There was no keyboard. Instead I could see what looked like a Mary Engine embedded behind a clear glass panel at the centre, while at its head, one on each side, were two demijohn-sized glass jars filled with a cloudy red liquid – the Rose Jars. A rack of HPCs, like those in the first room, stood either side of the organ and in front of the left-hand rack waited Terrence Skinner.

  He should have been wearing a black roll-neck jumper with a faux military insignia on his chest, but obviously Skinner hadn’t been reading the script and had turned out for the final confrontation in jeans, black Nike trainers and a loose blue pinstripe collarless shirt. He was, at least, sitting in a swivel chair in front of the steady unblinking lights of the HPC rack. But he didn’t say, ‘Ahh, Mr Grant, we meet again,’ which showed a shocking lack of etiquette on his part.

  ‘Hi, Peter,’ he said. ‘Come to see the start of the new world?’

  ‘I don’t want to be a downer,’ I said. ‘But I’m here to talk about Leo Hoyt.’

  ‘What about him?’ said Skinner casually, but the heel of his right trainer started to tap on the polished wood surface of the dais.

  ‘We need to clarify a few things,’ I said, and walked up to join Skinner on the dais.

  ‘We talked about this,’ said a voice from nowhere. ‘This is the response we anticipated.’

  The voice was an attractive tenor with a mid-Atlantic accent coming, I realised, from multiple speakers positioned in and around the organ. I used its arrival as an excuse to peer curiously at the machine.